Interesting Take on the Downtown Schnuck's

A member over at the Urban St. Louis forums - gsp9993 - provided some interesting and insightful information about the proposed Schnuck's slated to open downtown, at Ninth and Olive:


I attended a focus group with 11 other downtown dwellers and workers on the new Schnucks concept a few weeks ago. We reviewed the drawings of the new store and listened to the concept. The new Schnucks store is not a grocery store, but rather a larger version of City Grocers. The footprint and services were almost identical, except larger with a small pharmacy. Schnucks seems to be focusing on prepared food and catering and a large portion of the timeframe was spent on questioning the downtown workers on their breakfast, lunch and catering needs. Groceries seemed to be a necessary evil to maintain the Schuncks name. No one in the room was thrilled and at the end of the session the concept graded very poorly by all members of the group.

Bottom line - Schunks is probably stalling or revisiting its concept. In my opinion, they may tank the project. The comments from the group were brutally honest and may be too much for Schnucks to continue its plans for downtown. Even the sub sandwich that they unveiled was ordinary at best. At the focus group meeting, it was evident that Schnucks's downtown concept was directed to downtown workers, not residents. Very late in the session, the subject of hours was addressed and we were all shocked that they were possibly not considering longer hours on weekends and evenings. Everyone in the group associated the Schnucks name with groceries. The presented concept strayed from the Schnucks brand name and would not influence their buying decisions. Several members begged for a tradional grocery store for downtown. We left thinking that this was not planned and would never happen.

Of course, this is just one person's opinion, but I found the comments rather intriguing...